THE BEAUTY OF SIMPLICITY

Ubiquitous Microblogging in the Enterpise

Martin Böhringer and Peter Gluchowski

Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Chemnitz University of Technology, Thüringer Weg 7, 09126 Chemnitz, Germany

Keywords: Microblogging, Twitter, Social software, Web 2.0, Information management, Ubiquitous computing.

Abstract: Microblogging has become a primary trend topic in the World Wide Web. Compared with the history of

blogs, wikis and social networking services, its adoption in commercial enterprises seems to be the next

logical step. However, in the case of enterprise microblogging there is not only the possibility of copying

the public web’s functionality. In enterprise scenarios the mechanism of microblogging could have much

more use cases than its public pendants, i.e., ‘tweeting’ processes, machines and software. We

systematically develop a scenario for ubiquitous microblogging, which means a microblogging space

including human and non-human information sources in an organisation. After presenting a conceptual

description we discuss examples for the approach. Based on a comprehensive study of existing literature we

finally present a detailed research agenda towards ubiquitous microblogging for enterprise information

management.

1 INTRODUCTION

Business users have to deal with a high variety of

information sources and business processes.

Especially knowledge workers and managers face

the dichotomy of information overflow on the one

hand and the need for staying informed on the other

hand. With activity streaming, RSS and vendor-

driven solutions like Salesforce Chatter we currently

see the appearance of a new paradigm of enterprise

information allocation following a subscription

model. Users do not have to define information

needs for IT departments or have to call special

transactions in ERP systems to get the needed

information. Instead, they subscribe to information

related to a certain person, a business process or an

information object.

The most popular implementation of such

subscription approach in the public internet is the

microblogging service Twitter. It is an impressive

example of an unorganised system of information

sources which can be handled by the user with a

simple following/un-following principle. The

research vision of ubiquitous microblogging (short

form is #ubimic, the ‘#’ relates to the so-called

hashtags in Twitter) presented in this paper links to

these characteristics and describes a scenario where

every kind of information source is represented by a

microblog. This paper describes this approach from

a conceptual point of view as a way of information

allocation in enterprise information systems. The

#ubimic vision from a computer science point of

view has already been described in Böhringer &

Gaedke (2010).

In doing so, we answer the following research

questions:

– What does ubiquity mean in enterprise

microblogging contexts?

– How and why could ubiquitous microblogging

be useful?

– What are open research issues to meet the

vision?

The aim of this paper is to aggregate current

developments of microblogging technology to a

comprehensive vision of future microblogging,

named ubiquitous microblogging due to its all-

embracing character. Following this goal, we started

in section 1 by identifying and motivating the

problem. Section 2 presents an overview of

microblogging and defines the objectives of a

ubiquitous microblogging solution inspired by

current Web 2.0 applications. Chapter 3

demonstrates the approach with examples from

Twitter. Due to the highly dynamic research field

and the early research stage of our approach we

provide a comprehensive evaluation of our concept

Gluchowski P. and Böhringer M. (2010).

THE BEAUTY OF SIMPLICITY - Ubiquitous Microblogging in the Enterpise.

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Software Agents and Internet Computing, pages 65-70

DOI: 10.5220/0002864300650070

 SciTePress

in discussing open research questions on the way to

its realisation based on existing work.

2 BACKGROUND AND

OBJECTIVES OF UBIQUITOUS

MICROBLOGGING

2.1 Microblogging

The principle of microblogging is best known via

Twitter, its most famous application. Members have

their own public microblog where they can post

short updates. Other users can be ‘followed’ by

adding them to one’s personal network. An

aggregated view of all updates by followed

microblogs appears in chronological order on the

user’s start page. Microblogging services often

support a wide range of contribution possibilities.

For example, messages to Twitter can be posted via

mobile text messages, desktop clients or several

third-party applications.

Parallel to the adoption beyond internet users,

Twitter and microblogging in general became a

subject of research. Due to its unique approach,

researchers from different disciplines are interested

in the topic. Two general kinds of research works

can be identified in the existing body of knowledge:

A first group contains research which explains the

approach using statistical description (Java et al.

2007, Krishnamurthy et al. 2008, Huberman et al.

2009, Hughes & Palen 2009, Zhao & Rosson 2009)

or in building theory for predicting user behaviour

(Barnes & Böhringer 2009, Günther et al. 2009).

The second class deals with microblogging in

special use cases and is mostly design science or

case study oriented as these works go beyond

Twitter and develop further approaches for

supporting, e.g., enterprise information management

(Böhringer & Richter 2009, Barnes et al. 2010) and

e-learning (Ebner & Schiefner 2008, Skiba 2008)

with microblogging applications or research

technological foundations (Passant et al. 2008,

Sandler & Wallach 2009, Assogba & Donath 2009).

We will discuss these existing works on

microblogging in detail in section 5 as we develop

an agenda for further research.

2.2 Ubiquitous Microblogging

The new term of ‘ubiquitous microblogging’ leans

on the well-known research field of ‘ubiquitous

computing’. While the latter understands ubiquity in

the sense that artificial computing devices are

everywhere in the real world (Abowd & Mynatt

2000), the meaning of ubiquitous microblogging is

that of real world objects being integrated and

represented in an artificial computing space. In our

definition, ubiquitous microblogging means a

microblogging system including ‘everyone and

everything’ in an organisation, which means that

information from every human and non-human

information source is represented via microblogging.

Therefore we borrow the conceptual meaning of

‘ubiquitous’ in the sense of its Latin origin

‘everywhere’.

Weiser (1991) in his vision of ubiquitous

computing stated that ‘the most profound

technologies are those that disappear’. Figuratively

speaking, this is also true for ubiquitous

microblogging as the goal behind our approach is to

hide the complexity of information access in the real

world by providing a flat information space

accessible by the easy following-mechanism. This

leads to the objectives of a solution for ubiquitous

microblogging: following the core microblogging

approach it should support a maximum of ease of

use with nothing more necessary for usage than to

understand the natural principle of following and un-

following other people or information sources. The

main task for an information system for ubiquitous

microblogging therefore is to provide this simple

access to manifold information sources in the

required information space (i.e., an organisation) and

make the underlying complexity ‘disappear’. Table 1

provides a summary of the final objectives resulting

from the discussed specifications of microblogging

in a ubiquitous understanding.

3 EXAMPLES

The best source of evidence for the described

scenario of ubiquitous microblogging is Twitter.

Example A in figure 1 shows a humidity sensor,

which posts status updates from a tomato plant.

Example B shows a simple example of a software

programme connected to Twitter (in this case the

software testing framework of a research group at

our university tweets its current status). Example C

shows the Twitter stream of Tower Bridge in

London, where each posting contains information

about the current action (closing/opening), the ship

which caused the action and the ship’s direction.

The examples listed have one thing in common.

They represent highly specialised information

sources which are not from interest for a broad

ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

Table 1: Objectives of a solution for ubiquitous microblogging.

Origin of objectives Objectives

Objectives based on

microblogging properties

O1: Ease of use

O2: Ease of understanding (following-mechanism)

O3: Social networking functionality

O4: Possibility for interactive communication between the channels

O5: Open access to the platform (API, mobile clients et cetera)

Objectives based on the

ubiquitous approach

O6: Integration of multiple sources within the system boundaries

O7: Access to external information sources (i.e., Twitter)

Objectives based on the

enterprise context

O8: Filtering and re-composing of content (Böhringer & Richter 2009)

O9: Searching and analysing microblogging content (Barnes et al. 2010)

Figure 1: Examples of ubiquitous microblogging on Twitter.

public. However, for some stakeholders they provide

important information. As the publisher of the

information does not know, who these stakeholders

will be, microblogging with its following-

mechanism provides a simple and elegant way of

information allocation.

When transferring this thought to a business

environment, it is clear that, at virtually any time,

potentially new information requirements can

evolve, which could be covered by a ubiquitous

microblogging system. Existing research on

microblogging in enterprises confirms this effect of

unanticipated information reuses through their use of

public distribution (Böhringer & Richter 2009,

Barnes et al. 2010). Research discusses this

phenomenon as Serendipity (Vinoski 2008.

4 OPEN RESEARCH ISSUES AND

FUTURE AGENDA

The developed scenario of ubiquitous microblogging

produces a number of open research questions in a

wide range of disciplines. In the following

paragraphs we aim to provide a research agenda

towards the successful utilisation of ubiquitous

microblogging with a focus on the enterprise

context. In order to provide a foundation for further

research, we explicitly formulate and address

research tasks.

4.1 Understanding Microblogging

Microblogging can be seen as a unique

phenomenon. It is an extremely simple tool and yet

it has gained sustainable success. Many researchers

in the field of information systems and computer

science – the paper’s authors included – have not

perceived the platform’s potential until recently.

Since the benefits of microblogging therefore seem

to be hard to determine in a logical and deductive

way, using the reverse approach and exploring the

phenomenon is an important research task.

Questions like ‘How do people use microblogging?’

and ‘Why do people use microblogging?’ are a

reasonable source of knowledge on aspects of

ubiquitous microblogging.

A large part of existing research is based on

statistical description of Twitter. In an early paper,

THE BEAUTY OF SIMPLICITY - Ubiquitous Microblogging in the Enterpise

Java et al. (2007) present a topology of various uses

and usage intentions on Twitter. They further find

that Twitter’s users extend the Twitter question,

‘What are you doing?’ by including information

sharing (e.g. URLs) and normal conversations on the

platform. Further statistical studies of Twitter were

presented by a number of researchers including

Krishnamurthy et al. (2008, identification of

different user types) and Huberman, Romero and

Wu (2009, networks on Twitter).

Going one step further, some research has been

conducted to develop behaviouristic models for

explaining the ‘why’ in microblogging (Barnes and

Böhringer 2009, Günther et al. 2009). However,

with only two existing works on modelling

microblogging behaviour, there is no established

research framework yet. Clearly, there is a need to

understand the underlying principles of

microblogging services like Twitter in order to

design and implement successful expansions like

ubiquitous microblogging.

R1: Build and test predictive models for user

behaviour in microblogging services.

Enterprise adoption of microblogging is in a very

early stage of development. Therefore, there are not

yet many users in the enterprise context, which

would be a prerequisite for broader studies of the

area. As an alternative, existing cases should be

investigated in detail. Hence, the case study method

is a reasonable research methodology for learning

about microblogging in enterprises. To the best of

our knowledge there exist only two research case

studies (Böhringer & Richter 2009, Barnes et al.

2010), yet. Collecting and analysing more cases and

conducting multi-case analyses are important future

research tasks.

R2: Conduct case studies and multi-case

analyses.

4.2 Technical Issues

There is significant potential in supporting users in

searching the ‘hair stack’ for important information

(objective O9). For Twitter there exist a number of

small applications for visualisation and text mining.

However, they are prototype implementations and

are not integrated to each other or well-documented.

From a scientific point of view, little research has

been done in this area. Only Assogba and Donath

(2009) argue for a stronger visual support of

microblogging users and present a platform for

‘visual microblogging’.

Further, the user would benefit from support by

automated agents understanding the semantic

meaning of the information. For this reason, Passant

et al. (2008) present a concept for semantic

microblogging. However, the main question for the

enrichment of text with semantic information is user

acceptance, which is an important point in

microblogging as a medium that is mainly based on

the ability to publish information fast and easily. An

alternative to semantic markup of microblogging

postings is to understand the meanings of natural

language using Natural Language Processing (NLP).

However, it can be questioned how effectively NLP

could work on the very short, often informal and

possibly flawed microblogging postings. First

experimental prototypes have demonstrated the basic

feasibility of the approach (see, for example, the

service akibot.com).

R3: Support users with visualisation and

analysing functionality including semantic

richness.

4.3 Conceptual Issues

Our approach of ubiquitous microblogging implies

challenging conceptual issues. An important feature

of microblogging is the chance to interact with other

microbloggers. However, in a microblogging space

with actors like machines, sensors and processes,

this is hard to achieve (objective O4 conflicts with

O6). A user might want to ask ‘@machineR2D2

when is your next maintenance due?’. As discussed

above, text mining/NLP could be a possible solution,

but it is questionable whether the technology is

mature enough to achieve a good reliability. A

solution could be to divide microblogs in

unidirectional and bidirectional blogs. Unidirectional

blogs like @machineR2D2 could be associated to a

bidirectional channel, like the microblog of the

machine’s technician, for providing a backchannel.

The research challenge here, again, is solving these

problems with respect to simplicity and transparency

for users.

Another level of complexity evolves due to the

usage of mashups. Mashups could be very useful for

fulfilling O8. However, if mashups re-arrange

postings and are published as new microblogs, the

same posting exists twice. For example, a mashup

could aggregate all the microblogs of a machine

park’s devices and filter for the keyword ‘error’. The

result of this mashup could be a new microblog

‘@machine_errors’. Problematic in this scenario is

that the same event occurs in two microblogs, which

could lead to distorted analyses and double

ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

appearances. There are two possible solutions: First,

it could be defined that the original posting can only

occur in one, the original, microblog (i.e.,

@machineR2D2) and all other re-postings including

mashups (i.e., in @machine_errors) should be

handled as retweets. Second, from a conceptual

point of view, microblogs could be seen as sets of

postings and therefore set operations could be

applied to microblogs (mashups could be expressed

as basic operations like intersections and unions).

Although if a posting belongs to two sets double

appearances are precluded as both sets refer to the

same one element. While the second alternative

could be more elegant from a mathematical point of

view, its intuitive understanding for the users might

be questioned.

Further conceptual challenges include the

integration of existing information systems and

reliable rights management structures. Our short

discussion of conceptual issues shows that there

might not be the optimal solution from scratch. As

most of the problems do not exist on Twitter or other

known platforms, future works have to involve

experimental research on these issues.

R4: Conduct experimental research in order to

find reasonable solutions for conceptual issues.

4.4 Business Issues

There is a clear lack of research concerning the

business value of microblogging. To our knowledge

there are no ROI studies or use case analyses. While

significant savings and increasing efficiency can be

expected because of the rapid information

dissimilation, the reduced email traffic, as well as

awareness effects (Böhringer & Richter 2009,

Barnes et al. 2010), the potential negative impacts of

microblogging on productivity because of distraction

and ‘useless’ information (both phenomena are

described by Barnes et al. 2010) has not yet been

addressed properly.

The huge success of Twitter suggests that the

positive effects clearly outweigh the negative.

However, although many professional users such as

freelancers, media workers, researchers and IT

professionals use Twitter, the microblogging service

clearly is shaped by (semi-)private contents, which

leads to ‘fun’ as a positive effect for the users. Fun,

though, might not be a reliable factor in ROI

calculation.

R5: Develop and apply suitable methods for ROI

calculation for (ubiquitous) microblogging

systems.

4.5 Management, Law and Ethics

Other research questions focus on the social

consequences of a ubiquitous microblogging

scenario. From an organisational perspective, due to

the direct flow of information a change in corporate

culture and an at least virtual flattening of

hierarchies could be expected. Further, a particularly

interesting research question is the change in

communication behaviour because of

microblogging. In their case study, Barnes et al.

(2010) report that users see microblogging as an

efficient way to close their tasks. Following this

observation, in posting their information users would

have finished their information duties. However,

according to the classical communication model

(sender-receiver), with only posting information into

a microblog, communication has not taken place

until the receiver reads it. This means that, in

opposition to traditional media like the telephone or

email, the (potential) recipients of information are

responsible for finding and reading the pieces of

information. The possible advantage of this

mechanism is that receivers of the informational

content can also be people who would not have been

anticipated by the sender and therefore unexpected

communication could take place. However, it also

could happen that users overlook important

information. It must be questioned if the possibility

of ‘lost’ information is acceptable in the enterprise

context or if this scenario can be excluded by

appropriate solutions (i.e. in using optional

addressing).

R6: Research consequences of microblogging for

corporate organisation and communication.

Finally, there are a lot of unsolved questions

from legal and ethical perspectives. Is it ethically

acceptable that managers judge their team members

by their status postings? Do we lose human

relationships if we foster microblogging usage? Can

microblogging usage be obligatory against a

background of privacy and data protection? Can

humans and machines communicate on the same

level? On the other hand there are significant

advantages in terms of law fulfilment and ethical

standards: these include the fulfilment of

documentation and archiving requirements, process

transparency and equal access to information.

R7: Explore and discuss ethical and legal

consequences of (ubiquitous) microblogging.

THE BEAUTY OF SIMPLICITY - Ubiquitous Microblogging in the Enterpise

5 CONCLUSIONS

The presented concept of ubiquitous microblogging

as allocation principle for multiple enterprise

information sources is a research vision. The listed

open issues show that there are many tasks on the

way towards its realisation. We are going to test the

vision in different use cases. We are currently

running projects with RFID sensors in a LEGO-

based factory and Arduino-based mobile sensors.

Further, in case studies and experiments in Twitter

and enterprise microblogging applications we are

trying to understand how microblogging is applied at

the user side (Barnes and Böhringer, 2009; Barnes et

al., 2010). Finally, we are working on technological

foundations for ubiquitous microblogging and

therefore cooperate with different vendors of

microblogging technology like the SAP-related

ESME project, the microblogging-based artificial

intelligence system Akibot and the enterprise

microblogging system Communote.

The community around the idea of ubiquitous

microblogging is organised around http://ubimic.org.

We encourage other researchers to contribute and

discuss their ideas there or on Twitter using the

Hashtag #ubimic.

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ICEIS 2010 - 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems